As revealed in another selectively released testimony this week, a key witness in the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry offered a “substantial” update to his previous testimony on President Trump’s alleged “quid pro quo” with Ukraine involving military aide and a corruption investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
U.S. Ambassador to the European Union Gordon Sondland told congressional investigators that testimony from other witnesses — William Taylor Jr., the top U.S. diplomat in Ukraine, and Timothy Morrison, the senior director for Europe and Russia at the National Security Council — “refreshed my recollection” about whether he believed Trump was attempting to pressure Ukraine to address corruption by withholding military aide.
Sondland’s expanded testimony “offered several major new details beyond the account he gave the inquiry in a 10-hour interview last month,” The New York Times reported Tuesday. “In his new testimony, Mr. Sondland said he believed that withholding the aid — a package of $391 million in security assistance that had been approved by Congress — was ‘ill-advised,’ although he did not know ‘when, why or by whom the aid was suspended.’ But he said he came to believe that the aid was tied to the investigations.”
“I presumed that the aid suspension had become linked to the proposed anticorruption statement,” said Sondland, according to four new pages of testimony released by the Democrat-controlled investigative committee Tuesday. He reportedly said that he had begun to “presume” that by early September, the Times notes.
Sondland said that in his discussion with Andriy Yermak, a top adviser to the Ukrainian president, on Sept. 1 while Vice President Mike Pence was meeting with President Volodymyr Zelensky, he told Yermak that the U.S. military aid “would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks.”
“I said that resumption of the U.S. aid would likely not occur until Ukraine provided the public anticorruption statement that we had been discussing for many weeks,” said Sondland in the newly expanded testimony.
In a previously released series of texts between Sondland and Taylor, Sondland, an Oregon hotelier who donated to Trump’s 2016 campaign, assured Taylor that there was no quid pro quo imposed by Trump for the military aide.
During his famous July 25 call with Zelensky, President Trump asked for a “favor”: that he look into “this whole situation with Ukraine” in 2016, including the role played by Ukrainian-based cybersecurity company Crowdstrike, which the Democratic National Committee used to review the hacking of its emails.
“I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it,” Trump told Zelensky. “I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike… I guess you have one of your wealthy people… The server, they say Ukraine has it. There are a lot of things that went on, the whole situation. I think you’re surrounding yourself with some of the same people. I would like to have the Attorney General call you or your people and I would like you to get to the bottom of it. As you saw yesterday, that whole nonsense ended with a very poor performance by a man named Robert Mueller, an incompetent performance, but they say a lot of it started with Ukraine. Whatever you can do, it’s very important that you do it if that’s possible.”
Trump also asked Zelensky to “look into” the allegations against the Bidens. “There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that,” said Trump. “So whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great. Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it… It sounds horrible to me.”
Though Trump did not offer a clear quid pro quo in the conversation, the request, the Democrats maintain, is a potentially impeachable offense, particularly if they can prove that Trump withheld U.S. military aide in an attempt to pressure Ukraine to investigate his political opponent. Trump contends that he offered no quid pro quo for the investigation into the Bidens, while some of his defenders argue that even if he had, that would not be an impeachable action.
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